Xue Liu’s research while affiliated with York University and other places

To manage and optimize constantly evolving wireless networks, existing machine learning (ML)- based studies operate as black-box models, leading to increased computational costs during training and a lack of transparency in decision-making, which limits their practical applicability in wireless networks. Motivated by recent advancements in large language model (LLM)-enabled wireless networks, this paper proposes ProWin, a novel framework that leverages reinforced in-context learning to design task-specific demonstration Prompts for Wireless Network optimization, relying on the inference capabilities of LLMs without the need for dedicated model training or finetuning. The task-specific prompts are designed to incorporate natural language descriptions of the task description and formulation, enhancing interpretability and eliminating the need for specialized expertise in network optimization. We further propose a reinforced in-context learning scheme that incorporates a set of advisable examples into task-specific prompts, wherein informative examples capturing historical environment states and decisions are adaptively selected to guide current decision-making. Evaluations on a case study of base station power control showcases that the proposed ProWin outperforms reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods, highlighting the potential for next-generation future wireless network optimization.

6G networks have become increasingly complicated due to novel network architecture and newly emerging signal processing and transmission techniques, leading to significant burdens to 6G network management. Large language models (LLMs) have recently been considered a promising technique to equip 6G networks with AI-native intelligence. Different from most existing studies that only consider a single LLM, this work involves a multi-LLM debate-based scheme for 6G network management, where multiple LLMs can collaboratively improve the initial solution sequentially. Considering the complex nature of 6G domain, we propose a novel hierarchical debate scheme: LLMs will first debate the sub-task decomposition, and then debate each subtask step-by-step. Such a hierarchical approach can significantly reduce the overall debate difficulty by sub-task decomposition, aligning well with the complex nature of 6G networks and ensuring the final solution qualities. In addition, to better evaluate the proposed technique, we have defined a novel dataset named 6GPlan, including 110 complex 6G network management tasks and 5000 keyword solutions. Finally, the experiments show that the proposed hierarchical debate can significantly improve performance compared to baseline techniques, e.g. more than 30% coverage rate and global recall rate improvement.

Knowledge understanding is a foundational part of envisioned 6G networks to advance network intelligence and AI-native network architectures. In this paradigm, information extraction plays a pivotal role in transforming fragmented telecom knowledge into well-structured formats, empowering diverse AI models to better understand network terminologies. This work proposes a novel language model-based information extraction technique, aiming to extract structured entities from the telecom context. The proposed telecom structured entity extraction (TeleSEE) technique applies a token-efficient representation method to predict entity types and attribute keys, aiming to save the number of output tokens and improve prediction accuracy. Meanwhile, TeleSEE involves a hierarchical parallel decoding method, improving the standard encoder-decoder architecture by integrating additional prompting and decoding strategies into entity extraction tasks. In addition, to better evaluate the performance of the proposed technique in the telecom domain, we further designed a dataset named 6GTech, including 2390 sentences and 23747 words from more than 100 6G-related technical publications. Finally, the experiment shows that the proposed TeleSEE method achieves higher accuracy than other baseline techniques, and also presents 5 to 9 times higher sample processing speed.

Wild salmon are essential to the ecological, economic, and cultural sustainability of the North Pacific Rim. Yet climate variability, habitat loss, and data limitations in remote ecosystems that lack basic infrastructure support pose significant challenges to effective fisheries management. This project explores the integration of multimodal foundation AI and expert-in-the-loop frameworks to enhance wild salmon monitoring and sustainable fisheries management in Indigenous rivers across Pacific Northwest. By leveraging video and sonar-based monitoring, we develop AI-powered tools for automated species identification, counting, and length measurement, reducing manual effort, expediting delivery of results, and improving decision-making accuracy. Expert validation and active learning frameworks ensure ecological relevance while reducing annotation burdens. To address unique technical and societal challenges, we bring together a cross-domain, interdisciplinary team of university researchers, fisheries biologists, Indigenous stewardship practitioners, government agencies, and conservation organizations. Through these collaborations, our research fosters ethical AI co-development, open data sharing, and culturally informed fisheries management.

Teamwork is pivotal in medical teamwork when professionals with diverse skills and emotional states collaborate to make critical decisions. This case study examines the interplay between emotions and professional skills in group decision-making during collaborative medical diagnosis within an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS). By comparing verbal and physiological data between high-performing and low-performing teams of medical professionals working on a patient case within the ITS, alongside individuals' retrospective collaboration experiences, we employ multimodal data analysis to identify patterns in team emotional climate and their impact on diagnostic efficiency. Specifically, we investigate how emotion-driven dialogue and professional expertise influence both the information-seeking process and the final diagnostic decisions. Grounded in the socially shared regulation of learning framework and utilizing sentiment analysis, we found that social-motivational interactions are key drivers of a positive team emotional climate. Furthermore, through content analysis of dialogue and physiological signals to pinpoint emotional fluctuations, we identify episodes where knowledge exchange and skill acquisition are most likely to occur. Our findings offer valuable insights into optimizing group collaboration in medical contexts by harmonizing emotional dynamics with adaptive strategies for effective decision-making, ultimately enhancing diagnostic accuracy and teamwork effectiveness.

Real-time object detection is critical for the decision-making process for many real-world applications, such as collision avoidance and path planning in autonomous driving. This work presents an innovative real-time streaming perception method, Transtreaming, which addresses the challenge of real-time object detection with dynamic computational delays. The core innovation of Transtreaming lies in its adaptive delay-aware transformer, which can concurrently predict multiple future frames and select the output that best matches the real-world present time, compensating for any system-induced computational delays. The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, even in single-frame detection scenarios, by leveraging a transformer-based methodology. It demonstrates robust performance across a range of devices, from powerful V100 to modest 2080Ti, achieving the highest level of perceptual accuracy on all platforms. Unlike most state-of-the-art methods that struggle to complete computation within a single frame on less powerful devices, Transtreaming meets the stringent real-time processing requirements on all kinds of devices. The experimental results emphasize the system's adaptability and its potential to significantly improve the safety and reliability of many real-world systems, such as autonomous driving.

This paper introduces a game-theoretic model tailored for reward distribution on crowd-sourced computing platforms. It explores a repeated game framework where miners, as computation providers, decide their computation power contribution in each round, guided by the platform's designed reward distribution mechanism. The reward for each miner in every round is based on the platform's randomized task payments and the miners' computation transcripts. Specifically, it defines Opportunity-Cost-Driven Incentive Compatibility (OCD-IC) and Dynamic OCD-IC (DOCD-IC) for scenarios where strategic miners might allocate some computation power to more profitable activities, such as Bitcoin mining. The platform must also achieve Budget Balance (BB), aiming for a non-negative total income over the long term. This paper demonstrates that traditional Pay-Per-Share (PPS) reward schemes require assumptions about task demand and miners' opportunity costs to ensure OCD-IC and BB, yet they fail to satisfy DOCD-IC. The paper then introduces Pay-Per-Share with Subsidy (PPSS), a new reward mechanism that allows the platform to provide subsidies to miners, thus eliminating the need for assumptions on opportunity cost to achieve OCD-IC, DOCD-IC, and long-term BB.

As enthusiasm for scaling computation (data and parameters) in the pretraining era gradually diminished, test-time scaling (TTS), also referred to as ``test-time computing'' has emerged as a prominent research focus. Recent studies demonstrate that TTS can further elicit the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling significant breakthroughs not only in specialized reasoning tasks, such as mathematics and coding, but also in general tasks like open-ended Q&A. However, despite the explosion of recent efforts in this area, there remains an urgent need for a comprehensive survey offering a systemic understanding. To fill this gap, we propose a unified, multidimensional framework structured along four core dimensions of TTS research: what to scale, how to scale, where to scale, and how well to scale. Building upon this taxonomy, we conduct an extensive review of methods, application scenarios, and assessment aspects, and present an organized decomposition that highlights the unique functional roles of individual techniques within the broader TTS landscape. From this analysis, we distill the major developmental trajectories of TTS to date and offer hands-on guidelines for practical deployment. Furthermore, we identify several open challenges and offer insights into promising future directions, including further scaling, clarifying the functional essence of techniques, generalizing to more tasks, and more attributions.

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in general-purpose natural language processing tasks. However, LLMs are still facing challenges when applied to domain-specific areas like telecommunications, which demands specialized expertise and adaptability to evolving standards. This paper presents a novel framework that combines knowledge graph (KG) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques to enhance LLM performance in the telecom domain. The framework leverages a KG to capture structured, domain-specific information about network protocols, standards, and other telecom-related entities, comprehensively representing their relationships. By integrating KG with RAG, LLMs can dynamically access and utilize the most relevant and up-to-date knowledge during response generation. This hybrid approach bridges the gap between structured knowledge representation and the generative capabilities of LLMs, significantly enhancing accuracy, adaptability, and domain-specific comprehension. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the KG-RAG framework in addressing complex technical queries with precision. The proposed KG-RAG model attained an accuracy of 88% for question answering tasks on a frequently used telecom-specific dataset, compared to 82% for the RAG-only and 48% for the LLM-only approaches.

Structure-based drug design (SBDD) is a critical task in drug discovery, requiring the generation of molecular information across two distinct modalities: discrete molecular graphs and continuous 3D coordinates. However, existing SBDD methods often overlook two key challenges: (1) the multi-modal nature of this task and (2) the causal relationship between these modalities, limiting their plausibility and performance. To address both challenges, we propose TransDiffSBDD, an integrated framework combining autoregressive transformers and diffusion models for SBDD. Specifically, the autoregressive transformer models discrete molecular information, while the diffusion model samples continuous distributions, effectively resolving the first challenge. To address the second challenge, we design a hybrid-modal sequence for protein-ligand complexes that explicitly respects the causality between modalities. Experiments on the CrossDocked2020 benchmark demonstrate that TransDiffSBDD outperforms existing baselines.